AIMS Center

The AIMS Center for Math and Science Education is happy to be in a cooperating partnership with H.O.P.E. for K-8 Education (Hosting Ongoing Professional Experiences), an educational non-profit organization in Garden City, Michigan. H.O.P.E. for K-8 Education is also in collaboration with Schoolcraft College, a comprehensive community-based college located in Livonia, Michigan, with a satellite… Continue Reading

I had the opportunity to attend my first California Mathematics Council, Southern conference, in Palm Springs. The title of this year’s conference was “Sparking Deeper Understanding.” I headed out early the first morning of the conference with my notebook in hand, not really knowing what to expect. I have attended other conferences for different content… Continue Reading

This blog post is being written from Tucson, Arizona, where Tiffany Friesen, Paul Reimer, and I are attending the annual conference of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education. The approximately 600 men and women attending this conference are almost exclusively university professors along with their graduate students,… Continue Reading

Math for young children is much more than saying the number words by rote or memorizing the math facts. I just finished reading an article titled, “Learning Mathematics Through Play” by Anita A. Wager and Amy Noelle Parks. The early learning community has often said that children learn through play and there is research dated… Continue Reading

Over the last few weeks, I have been reading a lot about the intricacies of human perception and how we interact with the world around us. Or maybe I should qualify that statement and say how we “think” we perceive the world around us. A child’s perception of reality and learning in the classroom is… Continue Reading

Learning by teaching, Edgar Dale was an American educationist who developed the Cone of Experience, which is a conical display of what brain research shows. We remember 10% of what we hear, 10-15% of what we see, 15-20% of what we both see and hear, and 20-40% of what we discuss. We remember 40-80%… Continue Reading

I have often heard from teachers the following, “My students can do the problems with counters, but when I take the counters away, they can’t do the problems anymore.” I have seen many math textbooks that introduce addition equations with counters in early grades and after a few times using the counters, the students are… Continue Reading

“Listen to your students.” That was the crux of the message that I heard from Dr. Les Steffe during his 2-day visit at the AIMS Center. The context was mathematical, though I am sure the message can be applied more broadly. Dr. Steffe has spent the last 50 years as a Math Education Researcher at… Continue Reading

My work with the AIMS team began last month after 20 years in public education, first as an elementary teacher and later as a mathematics coach. I have spent a lot of hours in TK-12 classrooms, walking alongside teachers as they explored ways to make their classrooms places where authentic mathematics learning could happen. In… Continue Reading

So here we are, at the time I write this we have “dropped” (made public) 10 individual podcast sessions. These have come from a wide variety of perspectives and a span of preferences. Don’t be fooled though, while we have dropped these ten, we have almost ten more “in the can” (recorded and nearing their… Continue Reading